Mr. Write's Page

More useless facts for inquiring minds.

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— Tigers have striped skin as well as striped fur.

— The common land snail, familiar to many as an icky garden pest, typically hibernates through the winter months. If conditions require, however, snails can remain asleep for up to three years.

— The average adult human sheds between 30,000 and 40,000 skin cells per hour, or about one million skin cells per day.

— Ping-pong is a trademarked term in most of the world, which is why the term table tennis is used in the Olympics and elsewhere. Over the years, the game also has been known as flim-flam, whiff-whaff, and pim-pam. Supposedly, British soldiers in India invented the game in the 1860s.

— The real name of Sting, the British musician, is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner. He earned the nickname Sting early in his career when he performed in a yellow and black sweater, and a band-mate remarked that he looked like a bee.

— Change for a dollar can be made in 293 different ways.

— Most regulation golf balls in the U.S. have 336 dimples. British golf balls have 330 dimples. Some special types have as many as 500.

— Before he got into acting, Steve Buscemi was a New York City firefighter. After the 9/11 attack, he worked as a volunteer and helped NYFD dig through the rubble at Ground Zero. He also helped in the clean-up after Super Storm Sandy in 2012.

— The word with the highest score possible in Scrabble is oxyphenbutazone (a drug of some kind). The odds of getting to play this word are laughable, but if you did, and you covered three triple-word-score squares, it would be worth 1,778 points.

— Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair.

— Barbara Streisand is the only singer to have number-one-selling albums during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. During those five decades, she had nine albums at the top of the Billboard charts.

— In 1860 and 1861, before telegraph service was available, the fastest mail service to and from California was the Pony Express. It was a private business delivering letters and small packages between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento.

The service used riders on horseback and 157 relay stations. Horses were changed every 10 miles, riders every 100 miles. They covered the 1,900 miles in 10 days.

Over its 19 months of operation, the company lost $30.00 on every letter it carried.